After millions of Australians were hit hard by the massive Optus outage, the telco has announced it will offer a bonus 200GB of data as compensation for the 13-hour downtime.
There had been calls from across the country, including from the federal government, for Optus to provide compensation to many of its estimated 10.2 million customers – and not everyone is happy about the offer it’s made.
Depends what you mean by compensation.
If you’re after a monetary refund, Optus isn’t offering anything, but it has announced customers who were impacted by the outage will receive 200GB of bonus data.
Optus will provide eligible customers with 200GB of extra data as compensation for the nationwide outage on Wednesday that impacted more than 10 million Australians and lasted for more than 12 hours.
Key points:
- Optus will provide additional data to eligible customers after Wednesday’s national outage
- Its CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said Optus decided the 200GB was of “much greater value” than refunding customers
- Ms Bayer Rosmarin would not comment on whether she would step aside or resign as Optus CEO
In a statement, Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said the additional data was to acknowledge the “patience and loyalty” of their customers.
“We truly appreciate our customers’ patience and understanding as we worked to restore our operations yesterday,” she said.
“We know that there is nothing we can do to make up for yesterday and what customers want most is for our network to work all the time – which is our number one priority.
“But we also want to acknowledge their patience and loyalty by giving them additional data to help during the holidays, when so many people consume more data with friends and family.”
Eligible customers will have until the end of the year to activate the additional data, which will be available from Monday, November 13.
“Eligible prepaid customers will be able to access unlimited data on weekends until the end of the year,” a spokesperson for Optus said.
Optus said affected customers will be able to see “more details” about the offer and how to redeem it on Monday, but has not provided details about the eligibility criteria customers must meet in order to access the data.
A spokesperson for the company said businesses who were “uniquely impacted” by the outage should contact the Optus Business Centre.
‘I hope that was helpful’
It is still not known what caused the outage, with Ms Bayer Rosmarin blaming a “technical network fault” on Wednesday afternoon.
Optus now says “a network event” was to blame for triggering the “cascading failure” that shutdown its services across the country.
“Our network is designed with multiple layers of fallback and redundancy,” she told the ABC’s PM program on Thursday afternoon.
“It’s a complex network at the heart of it is a modern, intelligent router network that we’ve developed with the world’s leading vendors.
“And despite this, the network event yesterday triggered a cascading failure that resulted in the shutdown of services to our customers.”
Ms Bayer Rosmarin said Optus was “deeply sorry” for the outage, which came just over a year after the company was hit by a cyber attack, with the details of personal identity documents of more than 2 million Australians compromised.
“We know that we let everybody down yesterday, and that’s why we’ve put in place this thank you, for our customers,” she said.
“We really want to give them something that they will value that demonstrates how much we care, how sorry we are.”
Asked about whether the 200GB of data was a replacement for proper compensation or refunds, Ms Bayer Rosmarin said that Optus deemed it necessary to offer the data because of its higher value.
“We tried to go for something that was of much greater value than simply refunding people for one day of their service, “she said.
“We didn’t think that was enough.”
Towards the end of the interview, Ms Bayer Rosmarin was asked whether she had been asked to step aside by board members from Optus’s parent company SingTel — who are currently in Australia — or if she had considered resigning.
“I think we’re out of time, I’m so sorry,” she told PM.
“I hope that that was helpful.”
Ms Bayer Rosmarin’s interview with the ABC went for under six minutes.
Facing investigation
The move by Optus to offer additional data comes after the federal government announced it would investigate the outage earlier on Thursday.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the incident would be reviewed by her department, and follows the Senate establishing a parliamentary inquiry to examine how the telco communicated with its customers.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has already begun investigating whether triple-0 calls on mobiles were affected by Wednesday’s outage.
Optus said it welcomed the reviews, and intends to fully cooperate with the investigations.
The decision to compensate affected customers follows Optus’s parent company, Singapore Telecommunications (Singtel) reporting an 83 per cent rise in its half-yearly profit.
In a statement to the Singapore Exchange, Singtel said Optus’s earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) fell by 13.9 per cent to $141 million.
“For the half year ended 30 September 2023, Optus saw continued revenue and customer growth, although EBITDA and EBIT declined as a result of increased operating expenses and Enterprise margin erosion,” it said.
